


birth day

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul:re
Genre: Angst, Experimental, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 12:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4565322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s rare that they have the opportunity to fight together, but Hinami is always with him. She knows his every habit: his grumbled curses, his hard breaths, the particular liquid gust of his kagune. To her, he is a noisy fighter, but the one thing she has never heard from him is — a scream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	birth day

**Author's Note:**

> here are some sad ayahina headcanons balled up into a ficlet for [rcngshdws](https://twitter.com/rcngshdws).
> 
> if you paid to read this, i am so sorry, you were ripped off because you can find it on tumblr and ao3.
> 
> hope you all are having a good day~~

It’s rare that they have the opportunity to fight together, but Hinami is always with him. She knows his every habit: his grumbled curses, his hard breaths, the particular liquid gust of his kagune. To her, he is a noisy fighter, but the one thing she has never heard from him is —

_A scream._

It’s like someone punching through her ribs. She clutches her ears, whirls, falls. Scrambles. And runs.

Ayato’s scream cuts off and then begins again, renewed after a full breath, a crunch of bone.

_WAIT,_ Hinami begs. Her skin prickles; spines rise out of her back. _WAIT FOR ME._

This is the first time such a thing has ever happened, so, surely — there’s — _no way_ — his screaming gets louder and her kagune heave out extra spikes and she’s stumbling, she isn’t even close, but she knows that Ayato knows she is coming for him.

_TELL ME,_ she begs silently. _AYATO, TELL ME, HOW MANY, WHAT QUINQUE?_

She strains; she can hold her breath, but can’t stop the thunder of her pulse interfering. Finally, she hears a wet, rasping whisper.

_“Hina, I—”_

And then — she thought that there was no more horrible sound than his screaming, but she was wrong.

The most horrifying thing is silence.

* * *

Just that morning he had complained about the hot weather and she had trimmed his hair for him. Just that morning she had discovered a perfect birthday present. Just that morning her heart had been something organic, and not a machine, battering and shrieking and igniting as she runs.

_NO,_ she tells herself. _NO, NO, NO, NO —_

She tries to drown out her mind’s panicked spasms but can’t prevent flails and flashes. Ayato, sparing one of his rare carefree smiles — Ayato, face crushed into — _no_ —

Ayato brushing his hand against hers during meetings — Ayato, still and strangely twis — no, no, _NO_ —

That she would never see him again — no, no, she can’t think it, she can’t even imagine, she doesn’t want to see a world without him, not even in her mind’s eye. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t bear the thought of seeing a world without him in it. Her eyes burn.

_Don’t sob_ , she tells herself. _Don’t quit._

The air is dense with silence and then with the scent of blood so thick it’s all she breathes in and out. She feels faint already, she is convinced she will die on the spot if she sees him crushed or split in half on the ground, she convinced that the worst thing possible would be the sight of his eyes glazed and glassy, and, of course, it isn’t.

She collapses to her knees.

There is nothing here but a long, dragging smear.

* * *

Time stretches taut. Clenches her nerves in thick knots. Whirls and spins without meaning.

Hinami reaches, desperate for any moment to make sense, desperate for any anchor.

_Not again. Not again. Not again._

She is numb, all the way down to the pit of her stomach.

“Ayato,” she tries, but her voice is nothing, her voice isn’t even the rasp of dry leaves in the wind. Her feet dash and fail her again when the blood trail ends.

_Not again. Not again. Not again._

Her palms skid and turn slick with blood and studded with gravel. It doesn’t hurt. She heaves a breath, clutches one last whiff of hope that she catches in the breeze.

Hinami follows, and comes upon one half of it, and then the other, meters away from each other. The lenses are cracked, the buckle stripped from its leather. She picks up every fallen shard, cradles them against her chest, picking them up again when they tumble and clatter away from her.

His crystals are here, too, stabbed into the asphalt in the shape of his trademark whorl. Each one dissipates at the brush of her fingers.

_Not again. Not again. Not again._

The bell on the door clamors.

“Hinami?” Touka says. “What are you doing here?”

Hinami opens her mouth. _I don’t know,_ she wants to say, but nothing comes out.

“Hinami,” Touka calls, more firmly. “Are you okay?”

She has the same face as her brother. Hinami looks away and her cape shifts and Touka’s eyes drop to the lumpy shape made by the thing she’s carrying.

“Hinami,” Touka says, “what is—?”

It happens all at once, then. Years collapsed into a single, stabbing instant. The blood drains from her face (Hinami can hear the _gush_ of it); Touka’s hair whips as she looks up and down the street, searching for a shadow that isn’t there. Then she drags Hinami inside :re and locks the door.

In the back room, Touka rips apart the front of Hinami’s cape, exposing her arms, and the mask locked in the hard fold of them. She grips and pulls and Hinami lets her take one of the halves, lets her stare at it and then at her blood-coated fingertips.

Hinami watches. Her vision is getting blurry. She feels hollow.

And then — somewhere in that emptiness. An echo.

_“If you’re just going to sob, then quit.”_

“Onee-chan,” Hinami murmurs, after a while. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring him back.”

That’s what brings Touka off the floor fastest.

_“No.”_ Her voice cracking at the end. Her hand like a claw on Hinami’s arm. “Don’t. Don’t go.”

The whites of her eyes are red. Her voice is strong, but Hinami’s head is already set. Is already spinning.

“Don’t worry about it,” Uta tells her. “It’s on the house.”

Hinami turns it over in her palms. It’s lighter, smaller.

“Try it,” he tells her, and Hinami raises it to her face. When the strap is in place behind her head, it fits snug against her cheeks. She takes a deep breath.

“I made sure you have good ventilation,” Uta says, and Hinami nods. He starts to put on the last piece onto her face, but Hinami takes it and dons it herself. They’re nothing more than circles of dull metal, and everything goes dark.

“It’s not the same as it was before, but this suits you better.”

He pauses.

“Also,” he admits, “there wasn’t much left salvageable,” but she knows this already; nothing about this mask smells like him at all anymore.

“That’s okay,” she mutters back. She just needs to wait.

“ _Wait,”_ he snaps when she asks him questions while he’s concentrating.

“ _W-wait,”_ he gasps, whenever she reaches for his hand just after a meeting.

Ayato’s smell had at first been strange, and then strangely familiar, and then something she struggled to perceive. It had become so close; it permeated her own clothing, her own hair. When her cape starts to smell new again, her hands begin to tremble.

“ _Wait_ ,” he laughs, as she climbs high above him.

His scent will return to her soon.

And sure enough.

One morning, her hands _reach_. For a moment the lump of her pillow looks much larger than it actually is, and warmer, too — and then her unconsciousness sloughs away. She waits, breathing, but this morning is different, the scent stays, this time, and she follows it, through the day.

_“Wait.”_ For evening, when he can reach for her privately, properly.

_“Wait.”_ For night, which never lasts long enough.

_“Just stay a little longer.”_

_“I just want a second more.”_

She’s so close. Her heart is battering, shrieking, igniting. She steps out, showing herself, donning rinkaku with straining eyes and hooked horns desperate to grip. She tosses the first Dove behind her, and doesn’t look back at the sound of their body crashing into the wall of a building. She keeps her focus on the suitcase, which smacks on the pavement as the remaining Dove flings the empty shell of it aside.

Her mask makes it unnecessary, but she closes her eyes anyway, and can almost hear a grumbled curse. A hard breath. A particular liquid gush. She doesn’t even need to block the trademark whorl when it comes for her; she just steps forward, into a space perfectly between every shard.

“ _Perfect_ ,” Ayato whispers whenever she shows him her unblemished skin after training.

A curse — a loud one this time, from the Dove. Something about how it’s no matter; and then the familiar glacier-crack of Rc cells spiraling, vulcanizing. Just what she was waiting for.

She stands still, waits until they are close enough, and then spreads her koukaku, voluminous. She blocks their stab, re-guiding it easily, with a gentle skitter of sparks — and then she spreads her arm, proffering. An opening too big to resist. The Dove yells and lunges and Hinami lunges back, parries his strike with a buffet, and then folds her koukaku around them tightly. Tightly. Tightly. Until the snaps and gasping stop.

She inhales. Spreads her koukaku, with a sigh; then absorbs it, and everything else, back into her body.

Then she bends down, reaching toward the clatter she heard when he fell. She hears the whisper of steel when her fingers smooth and tighten around him. She strains her ears, hard, and hears nothing else.

* * *

Time is starting to slacken around her, starting to resume itself. To unravel. To settling back into meaning. She takes one step, and the next step that she takes follows after it.

Hinami knows the place that he describes as the highest place that he’s ever been in the city, and she goes to the other location she found, which is — she counted — two and a third meters taller. She sits on the supports, leans into the lee of them. The wind is so cold and strong here that it overwhelms all the noises from the streets below, carrying them far away. When she speaks, she imagines that the wind carries her voice away, too. Further than she can possibly perceive.

“It’s a little late...but...” She swallows, moistens her dry throat. “Happy birthday, Ayato.”

She pulls off her mask, and watches the skyline glow.


End file.
